Farewell, My Lover
by Clorinda
Summary: Revised version. 'Tall, tanned, good looking and debonair, they'd met as if pure accident, and if the angels had done it right, they'd have never known the other's existence.' EjixHevn.
1. Chapter 1

**Farewell, My Lover**

**By** Clorinda

**Rated**: PG

**Category**: Romance

**Summary**: Revised version. "Tall, tanned, good-looking and debonair, they'd met as if pure accident, and if the angels had done it right, they'd have never known the other's existence." (EjixHevn)

* * *

**Chapter One**

He's disappeared from her life now, but the piece of him held inside her, shall never break like her blind trust and his love. Eji had been hers, hers and only hers ... But that too, like him, had been an illusion.

He'd not come from Japan. He'd moved in among the steel skyscrapers and unseen slums of Tokyo as suddenly as he'd one day, departed. There'd been a woman with him, but not her, not Hevn. The woman's name was Ran. She would have made history and created a legend with him, if only ... if only he hadn't made his folly and fallen in love.

* * *

Every morning, she'd made it her habit to walk to work, the sky, blue and arching above her, the sounds of the street muted around her; just a demure scientist with blond curls walking down the pavement in a knee-long skirt.

She never was the object of a man's desire, nor did she ever become so.

Not even when she'd met him, because they may have been spiralling through an empty world of deceit and falsehood, but that one little crystal shard inside them both remained pure. He could love her without touching her.

Her friend had often offered a ride in the comfort of a car, but Hevn liked to walk. She liked to see the city she was trapped in forever, enjoy what little she had. She went to work each day, came home, stayed there, and returned to work again. The sky was unfairly bright, but she had no alternatives. Not until he came along, though...

Eji used to drive a car. A convertible, but cars are rarely a girl's passion. She liked flowers, and he'd often thought that was rather funny. She'd tell him every time that a living plant was better than moulded metal dipped in paint.

When he'd first come into her life, he'd been rolling past the curb in his new car. She hadn't seen him very well then, her eyes mostly seeing her new shoes. New automobiles, new footwear ... it was actually, in retrospect, quite funny.

They'd even laughed about it later, not offended that neither had been the focus of all attention when they first saw each other. They'd have gone on laughing if only Eji hadn't thought to stop the wheels from rolling past the woman on the curb that day.

* * *

**Author's Note**: This _does_ seem to be rather vague in the writing, but I guess it's a style I like experimenting with. EjixHevn shipping just seems to be a very convenient scapegoat. :rubs hands evilly:


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

The truth is both dangerous and beautiful at the same time, as enticing as the forbidden fruit. It is hidden to spare another's feeling, and yet for the same reason, it is told.

A beautiful story had unfolded its petals around the two of them, Eji and Hevn, and yet, had they been given the choice, that story would never have been told. And yet, you find me telling it still, because although it discomfits them to be told to the face about their own naïveté and weakness, you need to know everything about them to understand why she could love him, forgive him after what he'd done...

* * *

Brought up near more girls than men, Hevn had always found more friends than suitors. She'd loved a great many men, but then she'd come to realise she'd been merely infatuated with their faces. _They_, who they _were_, had never really mattered to her.

Even now she can tell you she would have never fallen to the ground from the sky for a man of Eji's calibre, who was strong, pleasing, philosophical and deep; yet he'd ensnared her like the fisherman does the mermaid. It was just the force and charm of who he was...

He'd been new and jobless in the city, or so she'd believed him say, and something moved in her heart. She wouldn't have done it had it been anyone else (heaven forbid!) but she said _yes, all right, I'll go out with you_.

Actually, it was more of a blush and an embarrassed smile.

One doesn't get to know the tastes of someone you've just met off-handedly on the street, but even so, even at a distance, one could tell Eji drank his own champagne. Or so she'd thought. Later, sullied with the knowledge of having known him, she'd realise that the champagne had been her own.

An elegant restaurant had sufficed for dinner, the two of them engaged in conversation beneath the hanging golden-orange paper lamps, her head ducked most of the time, him leaning back and savouring the taste of her face bathed in firelight. Not once did he think of Ran, waiting for him while her CDs played softly in the background, the portrait painted of a woman with her arms outstretched in an everlasting plea...

Although he'd never been able to convince her, _that_ was truly how much he'd loved Hevn. Not that she never gave him his chance...

He walked her back to her shared flat that night. Initially, he'd been intent on driving her, but the car took kindly to a flat tyre, but she hadn't minded. The walk was twice as long after the car had been towed away, and she felt a twinge of disappointment, standing at her window by the fluttering white curtains, watching Eji climb into a cab, and be escorted away, into the darkness, where the night was no longer lit by the lamplight on the street.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

Even if you see a happily married couple who have been bound together for years, even they shall tell you that they loved each other for different reasons, they married with different wishes. Eji had been attracted to her for what she awakened deep inside him, but Hevn ... she'd _grown_ to like him.

* * *

Unemployment did never suit Eji. Although he was going to be living under Ran's roof, something, some part of him that was pure and good, twisted at the thought of using her. He would pay her for his stay, and he would finance what he needed without borrowing a penny from her, lest he could not return even that much.

He had not seen much of Hevn since. It was nice to drop her at work once more if he chanced by her, but when he didn't, he drove through the city by himself, his mind clouded and dark with thoughts he would tell no one.

Deep inside, he struggled for an excuse to see her again. He was captivated almost by her shy manner, something so enticing in her untainted unaffectedness. He talked about her sometimes to Ran, and she would listen, her eyes closed, her fingers touching the back of his hand to ascertain he was still and always with her.

Finally, he learned to pluck out enough courage from himself to get into the car, drive steadily and none too fast, and park in the driveway of the Institution of Modern Science. On shaking knees he got out, nearly forgot to relock, and walked into the reception lobby.

Even as the cold, quick and efficient man his country knew him to be, he could have collapsed on his knees and kissed Hevn's hand for having rescued him at that moment.

She was going out for lunch, and he muttered some lie about not finding the man he'd been searching for, and escorted her out. She didn't very straightforwardly invite him to eat with her, and he was too embarrassed to impose. He smiled the best he could, nodded, shook her hand, and drove out of the parking lot, leaving her to gaze after him with wistful eyes. After that afternoon, he never could forget her amber eyes.

And even when he'd felt his own body break under the agony of gunfire, he'd dared to look up at her. Those flecked golden eyes had been widened in pain and horror; he'd felt it as those eyes wept for him even when he six foot under, hidden by earth and soil.

* * *

"**Unaffectedness**," is actually a word, and Ran, the woman who's been frequently mentioned here, is an OC (_my_ OC) and breaking my own unwritten laws, she'll be a semi-major part of the plotline. Basically, she helps to flesh out Eji's very shoddily-done character as much as possible.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note**: This one is by far my favourite chapter; it's based on a scene in the episode where Eji and Hevn are on a bench, possibly feeding the birds, and there's a city-skyscraper background behind them.

* * *

**Chapter Four**

Not always had he been suave and confident, and not always was she nonchalant, money-minded and casual. Once they'd been human too, standing together, their backs touching one another. They'd been open, vulnerable to emotion as well; they'd been alive. But then, one had died and other wilted...

* * *

When Eji had been only seven, and his mother still alive, Ran had been fond of birds. Once, she had found a little speckled sparrow with a bent wing, resting on the floor of her room. It had fallen through the open window, and collapsed in her room, too exhausted to move. She'd shown it to Eji, and she would keep the little bird and care for it forever. She brought it up in a cage, and when it could fly about, she opened the door, and let it soar into the sky.

Two days after that, Eji had been sweeping dry leaves into a sack to clear out the yard. He'd leaned the broom against the picket fence, and sat down on the ground. He'd barely had time to catch the small little bird that had come falling into the cup of his hands. It was Ran's little pet, that had stumbled out of the sky when it was trying to find its way home to her.

The poor creature was dead.

Somehow, that incident marked Eji deeply in his heart. He'd carefully wrapped the dead bird in his handkerchief, and each time he opened his chest of drawers, he would see a seven-year-old boy treasuring deeply what had touched him so hard.

When he saw Hevn again, she was sitting at a park bench two blocks down a popular shopping mall. It was Sunday, early in the morning, and she was holding a piece of bread. She was breaking it into crumbs and pieces, and lightly tossing it to the hungry birds.

She didn't sense his presence standing behind her at first, but only when the wary birds began to hop away, did she turn around. She smiled at him, and pushed some of the bread into his hand. He felt a curious sensation inside him that day as he sat there with her.

He wondered how Hevn would react if one of those birds were to suddenly die and leave her thinking it was all her fault.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

The prospect of a job had risen suddenly and gracefully, as the bather emerges from the water. Personally knowing the lab director, she was certain he would be more than welcoming to employ Eji's talents and resourcefulness. She was more than happy to find him a job, but even as she laid her head on her pillow that night, sweeping back her curling hair, she wondered how that would change her view of him, now that she knew where he was working and how much he earned.

Even after he grew dead to her mind and soul, to the very end, she'd always thought of him as an enigma. Tall, tanned, good-looking and debonair, they'd met as if pure accident, and if the angels had done it right, they'd have never known the other's existence.

If there was even a rice-grain of truth in what he'd often said to her, _that_ definitely wasn't it.

There was that time when he'd let slip, purely by the virtue of an untainted accident, about Ran. She didn't realise why her skin felt so warm, her throat so cold, her heart twisting so badly. She was jealous of a woman she'd never known, so jealous that she felt sickened and wanted to hate Eji, butcher him to a bloody mound of flesh.

"_Yes, I'd really love to meet her_."

Who was "Ran?" He spoke about her with that lilt in his voice, soft and deep at the same time, full of warmth, affection and love to Hevn's bleeding heart. To Eji, he recalled her face, the way she always sat half-in-shadow, her mouth hidden, but the smile always there, the silent touch that said she was not leaving without him.

"Oh."

Her tone was cold now, and Eji felt his stomach plummet, because he had not meant to say that aloud. He loved Hevn; he'd never want to see her hurting like this. There would be no way out of his own hand-spun web after that.

That night the only two women in his life met. The lights caught, glittered and spun around them, falling on the stark, almost wan, paleness of Ran's hand as she shook Hevn's. She said nothing, and the latter's greeting was stiff, formal, deliberately polite.

"How long have you known Eji?"

Ran's eyes had widened larger than they'd ever done. They flew from Hevn's expressionless smile to Eji, burning with reproach, lost composure and horror. _How could you do this_, they seemed to scream.

It was hard to miss, and even harder not to see the small _I'm so sorry_ that whispered between Eji's lips.

But Hevn had seen enough, she'd had enough of it, because she wouldn't stand outside their little glass cloud, watch with her eyes brimming with lonely tears. She was strong, and she was proud.

She turned around. And strode away. Eji could only watch in horror. Ran could not even look at him anymore.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

Mistakes, we make in plenty, and atonement is something of which we cannot have enough. In that one evening, through one dinner, unspeakingly, he horribly insulted Hevn, and once he tried to make his amends, it was Ran that he hurt next of all.

* * *

When she did not want to be found, perhaps even the shadows would not discover her. An unimportant lab technician she may have been, but Hevn had that rare gift of concealment that few people possess.

It took Eji the quarter of an hour to find her leaning against a wall, blocked from sight by a tall, potted green fern. The others diners filed in and eased out of the restaurant on the twelfth floor, but he had little intention of leaving. He didn't know what he'd done, but he was determined to fix what he'd broken.

She cried. Hevn cried with hot tears of anger, embarrassment, and unsaid apology when he told her the truth.

He loved Ran like he loved his life. She was still his little sister. And she could not speak.

After that, there descended a kind of carefulness between them. A delicate balance of unhidden secrets. They were, at last, finally learning to be open...

But there were some things Eji could not say. He was doing well at his job, and he was creeping closer and closer to his goal: to infiltrate and to bring to their knees, these people. He was a spy; that's whose mettle he was always fashioned out of, and _this_ was who he was.

It wasn't the only secret he kept. Because he never needed to tell her. Tell her how his heart pounded in his chest when she came closer. He never needed to tell her because she could always hear it in the wind each time she listened.

He was in love with Hevn. He didn't know if she felt the same way too.

* * *

**Author's Note**: The end's coming soon; two more chapters left, I should say.


End file.
